Friday, June 29, 2012

As I noted
in a recent post, the Spring
2012 issue of Theoretical and Applied
Ethics contains a symposium on Ethics, Atheism, and Religion, with a lead
essay by atheist philosopher Colin McGinn.
I wrote one of the responses to McGinn’s piece, and one of the other
contributors, Steve
Fuller, wrote an essay with the title “Defending Theism as if Science
Mattered: Against Both McGinn and Feser.”
What follows is a reply to Fuller.
(Readers who have not already done so are advised to read McGinn's essay, mine,
and Fuller’s before proceeding. They're all fairly brief.)

Monday, June 25, 2012

Gene
Callahan responds to my recent
criticisms of his view that plants are sentient. (Some plants or all? Gene seems to think all of them are, though
the evidence he appeals to would show at most only that some of them are.) Recall that I had noted three reasons
Aristotelians deny that any plants possess conscious awareness. The first is that plants lack the specialized
sense organs we find in animals. The
second is that plants lack the variability of response to stimuli that animals
possess. And the third is that sensation
together with appetite and locomotion form a natural package of capacities, so
that since plants lack locomotion they must lack sentience as well.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Economist Gene
Callahan (a friend of this blog) calls my attention to this
article, which claims that plants are capable of “sensory” responses to
their environments, and even that they “talk and listen to one another.” Gene
concludes that “contrary to Aristotle, plants are active and communicate to
each other, with sounds among other methods” so that “neo-Aristotelians ought
to drop the idea that plants lack sensations.”
And while Gene allows that “this certainly does not invalidate all of
Aristotle's metaphysics,” it does in his view show that Aristotelians should be
wary of once again “ma[king] the mistake of tying Aristotelian metaphysics to
Aristotelian natural science.”

But (no disrespect to Gene intended) as usual
with these breathless journalistic “Science has shown that…!” stories, the actual
facts are far less exciting than the sensationalistic packaging would suggest.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

The Spring
2012 issue of Theoretical and Applied
Ethics contains a symposium on Ethics, Atheism, and Religion. The lead essay is by Colin McGinn and is
followed by responses from me, Steve Fuller, Ted Peters, and Robert Sinclair. All the essays can be read online, so go take
a look.

Sunday, June 17, 2012

I wonder, where does the philosophy
of physics and in general the philosophy of science fall in between the scheme
of metaphysics and philosophy of nature?...

Also, where does the discussion on
the topic of the laws of nature belong? Is
that also philosophy of nature?

Let’s start
with the question of how the philosophy of science is related to the philosophy
of nature. Recall from my recent post
that as the middle ground field of the philosophy of nature gradually
disappeared off the radar screen of modern philosophy, the disciplines on
either side of it -- on the one hand, metaphysics and on the other, empirical
science (in the modern rather than Aristotelian sense of “science”) -- came to
seem the only possible avenues of investigation of reality. Recall also that the methodology of metaphysics
came to seem a matter of “conceptual analysis,” while any study with empirical
content came to be identified as part of natural science. The very notion that there could be a middle
ground field of study with empirical foundations but arriving at necessary
truths, thus transcending the contingent world described by physics, chemistry,
etc. and pointing the way to metaphysics -- as Aristotelian philosophy of
nature claims to do -- was largely forgotten.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

When Ray
Bradbury was twelve years old, he went to a carnival and encountered Mr.
Electrico, a performer who sat in an electric chair with current running
through him so that his hair stood up and an electrical sword he held would
glow. Touching the sword to the young
Bradbury’s head, Mr. Electrico exclaimed: “Live forever!” Alas, Mr. Electrico’s command has gone
unheeded, for Bradbury died last Tuesday at 91 -- long-lived, to be sure, but
well short of forever.

Thursday, June 7, 2012

George Mason
University physicist Robert Oerter has completed his
series of critical posts on my book The
Last Superstition. I responded
to some of his remarks in some earlier posts of my own (here
and here,
with some further relevant comments here
and here). In this post I want to reply to what he says
in his most recent remarks about the Aristotelian argument from motion to an
Unmoved Mover of the world.

Friday, June 1, 2012

When
figuring out how many human beings of average weight can be carried on an
airplane, engineers deal with abstractions.
For one thing, they ignore every aspect of actual, concrete human beings
except their weight; for another, they ignore even their actual weight, since
it could in principle turn out that there is no specific human being who has
exactly whatever the average weight turns out to be. This is perfectly fine for the specific
purposes at hand, though of course it would be ludicrous for those responsible
for planning the flight entertainment or meals to rely solely on the
considerations the engineers are concerned with. It would be even more ludicrous for them to
insist that unless evidence of meal and movie preferences can be gleaned from
the engineers’ data, there just is no fact of the matter about what meals and
movies actual human beings would prefer.

About Me

I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.